Photo credit: Greg Giannukos

On June 14, Austin, TX’s Los Coast will release their much-anticipated debut album, Samsara. The group, which is led by principal members Trey Privott (lead vocals, guitar) and John Courtney (guitar, keyboards, vocals), blends a variety of genres to fashion a unique mélange of  soulful psychedelic pop. Privott explains, “We’re lucky to be able to explore these different sounds and different attitudes, and do a little dabbling. We started with a blank canvas, and we built a diverse color palette around the album that we wanted to create. It felt like everything was fair game, from psychedelic funk to the blues to acoustic singer-songwriter pop.”

Today we premiere the official video for “Monsters” from the forthcoming record. Privott tells Relix that the song “is a psychedelic fever dream about some of the fears and anxieties modern Americans face while trying to maintain their soul. One of the first songs we wrote as a band, I wanted to make something dark and spooky but with a solid groove. We wanted to capture a tribal feel to go along with lyrics about manipulation and other necessary evils that exist in everyday corporate America: how handshakes could end up hurting like a snake bite or and could make your knees shake. Some of my songs are written during anxious moments as a way to deal with my reality. I also wanted to write something that wasn’t completely hopeless too though so it almost turned out sounding like a love song. I’d been listening to a lot of David Byrne at that time. He always talks about his landing into situations, becoming self-aware, then writing as a first-hand account, so we used ‘how did we get here’ as a sort of lyrical interpolation of the call and response from [Talking Heads’] ‘Once in a Lifetime.’ The hope is that you can come to in some of these messed up situations and actually learn and do something about it. For us, it is a declaration of persistence through the forces of darkness as a means of appreciating our own light. For you, let it be whatever you’d like.”

Los Coast, which also features Megan Hartman on bass, Damien Llanes on drums and Natalie Wright on keys will tour steadily into the fall in support of Samsara, which is now available for pre-order.

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